by Sue Williams
With so much excitement, it wasn’t long before Joanne suggested to Peter that they stay in Sydney a little longer. ‘Sydney had exceeded all my expectations,’ she says. ‘I fell in love with it straightaway, more so than Pete, I think. I would have happily stayed there longer.’ She was having so much fun, she really wanted to delay the rest of their trip by a couple of months. They were in no mad hurry, and besides, she had another reason she wanted to stay on. A secret reason.
AS SOON AS THE COUPLE had seen all the main sights of Sydney, Peter’s mind had clicked straight into gear about the next part of their trip. This was the adventure that most interested him: the long drive around the southern coast of Australia, up through its remote centre to Darwin, its most northerly city, and over to Queensland on the northeast coast. His job was going well, but wasn’t particularly stimulating, and after five months of being away, the twenty-eight-year-old was getting restless to hit the road. ‘He had itchy feet,’ says Joanne, now twenty-seven. ‘I was really settled in Sydney and I didn’t want to leave, but Pete was pushing to go.’
He began scouring the travellers’ ads posted up in all the backpacker haunts for a campervan to make the long trip up north. Peter was handy around cars — one of his brothers, Paul, has his own auto electrical business — and he knew exactly what he was looking for: something big enough to allow them to be self-contained, but cheap and reliable. One Saturday morning, he went to the Kings Cross Car Market, a popular sale yard held in an underground car park where travellers are permitted to sell their vehicles. Chatting to the owners lounging on camping chairs or snoozing on the front seats while waiting for buyers, Peter spotted an old orange VW Kombi pop-top van on sale for $3000. It had seen better days but it came complete with a fridge, a fitted gas cooker and sink, a CD player, curtains on the back windows, and a full service history. The owners, a young couple who had just finished their own tour of Australia and were due to fly back to Europe in a few weeks, swore that the van was a beautiful runner, and that they’d had no trouble with it at all. It had recently had a new paint job in bright orange with a white go-faster stripe along the body, and bore Tasmanian plates. It also had 85,000 miles on the clock, but 185,000 could well have been closer to the mark. The couple was keen to sell, but Peter wouldn’t be hurried. He took it out for a test drive, then left, saying he’d think about it. He went back the next day and asked if they’d cut their price. He noted that it was due to run out of registration in the middle of July, so he’d have to re-register. By the end of the week, on May 24, he bought the van for $1200.
When Joanne saw it, she wasn’t quite as thrilled. They were planning to drive vast distances, and the van’s top speed was around 80 kilometres per hour. It could go faster — the speedometer went up to 60 miles, or 96 kilometres, per hour — but the vehicle shuddered and strained so much that it didn’t seem safe. The gears were clunky and often hard to find and she worried it might break down in the middle of nowhere. Peter’s spirits, however, wouldn’t be dampened. ‘He loved that old van,’ says a friend he met in Sydney, Michael Hardacre. ‘He loved everything about it. He couldn’t wait to get out into the outback in it. He spent every spare minute tinkering with it.’ Peter installed a lamp in the back to read by and a shelf under the dashboard for things like cans of drink, his Ventolin inhaler and his cigarettes. Then he hooked up two spotlights to the rear of the van, and installed a safety deposit box for their documents and money.
Joanne’s lack of enthusiasm wasn’t based solely on the state of the Kombi. She was having too much of a good time in Sydney to leave just yet, and had made great friends. She, Amanda and another work friend, Alison, had even earned the nickname ‘The Angels’ after the TV icons Charlie’s Angels, because they were always together. In addition, Joanne loved everything about Sydney: the easy lifestyle, the beach and the nightlife. Peter went along with Joanne and her friends a couple of times, but he felt a little left out. Joanne, however, didn’t mind all that much that he didn’t join them more often.
Because she’d met another man.
HE WAS A BRITISH BACKPACKER called Nick Ellis Reilly who’d been working as an IT specialist at a city firm near the bookstore and who often came to the same stall where Joanne went on her daily coffee runs. It had started innocently enough. Nick was twenty-seven, a Reading University graduate, and had been in Sydney for eight months, mid-way through his trip around the world. He was good-looking with dark hair and eyes, just like Peter, but with more chiselled features. His personality, however, was markedly different. While Peter was earnest and intense, Nick seemed to take nothing seriously. He loved drinking and partying hard with the boys, and finishing off the night with a good-looking girl. Sipping coffee at the stall, he enjoyed bantering with any attractive women who passed by. He could be flirtatious, a real ladies’ man but, in truth, he was simply a young lad having the time of his life in a new city on the other side of the world, determined to make the most of every opportunity before going back home, finding a steady job, and reentering the drudgery of normal life.
He noticed Joanne immediately. With her pale skin now tanned and her glossy dark hair always worn down to brush her shoulders, she looked more beautiful than ever. She was shy at first, and Nick loved to tease her and watch her blush. He was friendly with Tim Ford, one of the staff members at the bookshop, and suggested a group of them go out drinking one Thursday night at a good pub he knew close to the house he shared with a number of other backpackers in Brown Street, Newtown. Joanne went along, and one thing led to another …
She wasn’t proud of what happened, but she couldn’t stop herself. She loved Peter, but Nick offered her something quite different. It was the excitement of the forbidden, the danger of the unknown and the thrill of the unexpected, with a man who was hellbent on having a good time. Beside Nick, Peter seemed plodding, dependable and all too familiar. Joanne fully expected Peter to propose to her on their way home from Australia via New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii, and knew she’d say yes without hesitation. But she and Peter had grown up in the same tiny corner of England and knew exactly what each other was thinking, and what their future would undoubtedly hold. Nick, on the other hand, was an unknown quantity, an adventure. For the new Joanne, the outgoing, sociable party girl Joanne, this could well be her last chance to have a fling. She was smitten.
One of the women with whom Nick shared the large Gothic Newtown house said that Joanne certainly wasn’t the only woman he brought home, but that he seemed to like her a lot. ‘She had become quite important to him,’ she said. ‘He calmed down considerably. But he was a bit of a dark horse in that he played his cards close to his chest.’
Another of the group who went drinking on a Thursday night noticed how close Joanne and Nick were growing, despite her relationship with Peter, but chose to say nothing. ‘I wouldn’t say they were all over each other but they certainly seemed comfortable in each other’s company, and she always stayed the night in an upstairs bedroom at the front of the house,’ he said. ‘There were probably four people staying there at any time, so no-one really noticed.’ Often the pair would have coffee together the morning after at the Satellite Café on the corner before catching the train into town, and work. At one point, Joanne even briefly considered leaving Peter for Nick, one of her Sydney girlfriends later told the police. The idea was only mentioned once, in an idle ‘what if’ conversation.
For Nick and Joanne both knew, really, that their relationship was always likely to remain no more than a brief encounter. Nick was due to leave around the end of June for a Contiki tour to the US. Peter too was growing restless and wanted to make tracks. As the deadline for both their departures approached, Joanne and Nick’s Thursday nights together grew in intensity.
ON JOANNE’S LAST FRIDAY AT Dymocks, the staff presented her with a going away gift of a pendant and organised a farewell dinner at the Blackbird Café, a funky restaurant with loud music and flamboyant wait staff at Cockle Bay. Employing so many backpackers, Gary
Sullivan had been to numerous farewell dinners before. ‘We all thought what a great couple they were,’ he says, unaware of Joanne’s clandestine romance on the side. ‘Everyone was sad to see them go.’ After the restaurant, some of the group went back to the EP1 nightclub to dance the night away. After Joanne had left, there was a raid by police and sniffer dogs to look for drugs. It was a lucky escape: Joanne, Peter and their friends were by no means innocents in that regard but no-one left there that night had any on them.
Joanne and Nick also managed to fit in a private farewell, and agreed to keep in touch via email in the future. Nick even set up a Hotmail account with the name ‘Steph’, so that if Peter caught her emailing him, she could say she was contacting a girlfriend. Joanne was torn between the two men. Time with Nick was exciting, although she knew the thrills were heightened by the fear of discovery, not to mention the fact that he liked to play the field. But she also knew Peter represented a more caring, and steady, future. She made the right choice: before she’d even left Sydney, Nick had gone off with another woman to New Zealand.
As Peter and Joanne finally set out from Sydney on the morning of 25 June 2001, their friends urged them to take care. Just a few months before, yet another British tourist, David Eason, had gone missing. He’d gone for a walk on the heritage-listed Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world just north of Brisbane, and no-one had seen him again. The newspapers were full of the mystery, and revived it again a few weeks later, just before Peter and Joanne’s departure, when two of the dingoes running wild on the island killed a nine-year-old boy and savaged his younger brother. The speculation was intense: had David Eason been attacked by those same dingoes; had he faked his own disappearance; had he drowned after swimming in the rough surf; had he just become lost on the way back to the tour bus; or had he met an even more sinister end?
But such dangers couldn’t have been further from the couple’s minds. They were intent on the journey ahead, travelling west through the Blue Mountains two hours away en route for Canberra, Melbourne and then Adelaide before taking the long road north to Alice Springs and Darwin. Peter was overjoyed finally to be on the road in his beloved Kombi, heading for adventure, while Joanne was quiet, thinking of the adventure she was leaving behind.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FAST CARS, DRUGS AND GUNS
SOON AFTER BRADLEY MURDOCH GAINED early release for good behaviour, he turned to a new moneymaking enterprise: drug-running. It seemed a sensible career choice, combining as it did many of his passions — easy money, long-distance driving, guns and, increasingly, drugs. When he stepped back into society in August 1996, he felt better equipped for the job than ever. With West Australian jails holding countless bikie criminals, many of the gangs actively used the institutions for recruitment. Time behind bars is often employed wisely too, to sharpen skills and nurture the necessary contacts for a flourishing outlaw life afterwards. Murdoch was thirty-eight, tall, broad-shouldered and weighed 108 kilograms. With a lantern jaw, high forehead, lips curled into a disdainful sneer, his top front teeth missing and tattoos over his arms and legs, he was an intimidating figure.
‘He was a prickly son of a bitch at the best of times,’ says one of his old mates, Gary Jones. ‘He could get really moody. Then you knew to watch yourself. But when he was in a good mood, he could be all right. You have a few beers with him and a laugh. He could turn his hand to anything and make a fist of it as well. Cars … trucks … Brad was fucking great at fixing anything and making stuff. He was always messing around with his tools. And he knew his way around the place like the back of his hand.’
His years as a truck driver had taught Murdoch everything he’d ever need to know about Australia’s highways, byways and backroads. He knew the fastest route from A to B, the best road for heavy loads and just which way you could travel to be sure of not meeting a soul. He knew the seasons you could cross the desert, and precisely when the heavy rains would turn mud roads into treacherous bogs. From his time as a grader driver he was also familiar with all the little-known, unmapped pathways criss-crossing the outback, and which way the drain gullies ran and where even the faintest of tracks would lead you.
For many, the vast wilderness of the Kimberley can seem threatening. To Murdoch, it felt like home. At 423 square kilometres, the Kimberley covers an area about three times the size of England, yet with 1500 times fewer people. Indeed, the Kimberley is one of the most sparsely populated places on earth. In 100 square kilometres of England, there’s an average of around 38,000 people. In the same area of the Kimberley, there’s an average of about eight. It’s a rugged, tough landscape with spectacular gorges, mighty rivers, arid desert areas and, occasionally, thick rainforest. It’s home to predatory saltwater crocodiles, white-bellied sea eagles, kangaroos and rough, hard towns reminiscent of the American Wild West. Much of its coastline is so isolated it has yet to be surveyed. It was exactly the kind of remote, untamed place Murdoch liked.
At first, Murdoch set up home in Derby, 250 kilometres northwest of Fitzroy Crossing. With its imposing jetty built high to survive the occasional 11-metre king tides while the area’s wool and pearl shell exports are being shipped, it’s also the home of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The place suited Murdoch, at first. The town’s so spread out, it appears almost empty, and he enjoyed the lonely, eerie atmosphere of somewhere that feels like it’s perpetually waiting for something, anything, to happen. The massive Boab trees with their spindly branches looking more like their roots, and the blood red earth only added to the air of desolation. As a roadtrain driver in a remote area where nearly every necessity has to be trucked in and everything of value — beef, diamonds, uranium, black granite — has to be trucked out, it was easy to find work. Murdoch did some time fixing crab pots, but mostly he took the wheel of heavy trucks, driving for a number of different companies, including the world’s biggest single producer of diamonds, the Argyle Diamond Mine, 900 kilometres east of Derby. His prison contacts proved useful as well and he’d already been recruited by a bikie gang to ferry marijuana and speed — the two bikie favourites — around the country as he drove.
It was good work for him. If you can stand the loneliness and cope with the long hours motoring across featureless vast distances, and then put up with temperatures outside the cab soaring over 40 degrees Celsius in the wet season from October to March, it’s not bad at all. It helps too if you can sort out the problems if anything goes wrong, and Murdoch was nothing if not handy with a spanner. Better still, out there on the road you’re completely your own boss, with no-one standing over you. The toughest part was trying to stay awake for hour after monotonous hour, and keep going without breaks, in order to collect the big wages. Many drivers need a little help with that, and the use of stimulants like speed is so common in the Australian trucking industry that random drug tests are about to be introduced. For those drivers badly affected by long-term amphetamine use, cannabis can be smoked to help them sleep after shifts that can last more than sixteen hours a day.
Murdoch was a regular caller at many of the towns on his route. ‘Yeah, I know Brad,’ says one drinker in Derby’s Spinifex Hotel. ‘Top bloke. Staunch. He often had a drink here on his turnarounds. Didn’t say much.’ Murdoch had a few girlfriends along his route too. One was secretary Lana Powell whose car he’d always fix if she needed a hand. ‘He was a gentle giant,’ she says. ‘He would always come round and see me when he was in town.’ Another was a woman called Jodie, with whom he briefly set up house, and later lovers included Beverley Allan and Jan Pittman. He was never short of a girlfriend and, it was rumoured, often had more than one on the go at the same time.
BY EARLY 1998, MURDOCH WAS growing restive again, and decided on yet another change of scene, moving out to the busier Kimberley coastal town of Broome. He hadn’t lived in a proper town for years but soon took a liking to Broome’s laidback lifestyle and rough, knockabout charm. The tropical climate is kind, the living is easy, and the characters are colou
rful. It’s the kind of place people drift into from all over the world. Nearly everyone is from somewhere else, either escaping from — or looking for — something or someone. No-one asks questions and if they do, they rarely expect to be told the truth. The old pearling town is now fashionable and multicultural, attracting an increasing number of tourists every year to its white beaches, turquoise waters, red sandstone cliffs and exotic history. But scratch the surface, and beneath lies a battlers’ town. Real men in blue, sweat-soaked singlets, frayed shorts and workboots eat pies in the bakery and drink in the Roebuck, eyeing the bikini-clad barmaids pouring schooners from a raised platform, all the better to see them when they lean over to hand you your drink. Their women buy cut-price groceries in the big supermarket just outside town, leaving the bijou boutiques, cappuccinos and pearl stores in the centre for the tourists. Families are able to live on much less than in any other major conurbation in Australia, but many still struggle.
An old truck-driving mate of Murdoch’s brother Gary, Brett Duthie, had set up a trucking company, West Kimberley Diesel, and Murdoch picked up part-time work. Happily, he was paid in cash, and was also allowed to live in a caravan in the ramshackle yard of the workshop. He moved in around August 1998, with his pet dog, a Boxer. ‘He was a great bloke,’ says Duthie. ‘I have good instincts about people, and I’d always liked him. The only difference between Brad and myself is that I’ve got a ticket basically. He was casual, depending on the work. It was convenience for myself mainly. If I was too busy, Brad would help.’ Murdoch also worked at a couple of other trucking companies in Broome’s sprawling industrial area outside the town, Sandfire Transport and Broome Contracting among them. Because he had the stamina for driving long distances, as well as the mechanical know-how, he found he could pick up and drop jobs whenever he liked. ‘He had a good reputation as a hard worker,’ says Tony Norton, owner of Sandfire Transport. ‘He didn’t mess about on a job. You wanted workers like that.’
